Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

508 | HOW THE MIND WORKSsuffer a reversal of fortune, especially in the harsh life of a forager. Onceabandoned, a stricken forager is not long for that world. What kinds ofthoughts and feelings might evolve as a kind of insurance in which otherpeople would extend "credit" to you even if misfortune were to make youa risk?One strategy is to make yourself irreplaceable. By cultivating expertisethat no one in the group can duplicate, like toolmaking, wayfinding,or conflict resolution, you make yourself costly to abandon in times ofneed: everyone depends upon you too much to risk letting you die. Peopletoday do spend a lot of their social lives publicizing their unique andvaluable talents or looking for a clique in which their talents would beunique and valuable. The quest for status is in part a motive for makingoneself irreplaceable.Another is to associate with people who benefit from the things thatbenefit you. Merely by going about your life and pursuing your owninterests, you can advance someone else's interests as a side effect. Marriageis the clearest example: the husband and wife share an interest intheir children's welfare. Another was pointed out by Mao Tse-tung in hislittle red book: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." A third is to possessskills that benefit others at the same time that they benefit you, likebeing good at finding your way home. Other examples are living with aperson who likes the room at the same temperature or who likes thesame music. In all the examples, one delivers a benefit to someone withoutbeing altruistic in the biologist's sense of incurring a cost and therebyneeding a repayment to make the act worthwhile. The challenge of altruismhas attracted so much attention that a more direct form of helping innature has often been downplayed: symbiosis, in which two organisms,such as the algae and fungi making up lichen, associate because the sideeffects of each one's lifestyle fortuitously benefit the other one. Symbiontsgive benefits and take them, but neither pays a cost. Roommateswith the same taste in music are a kind of symbiotic pair, and each canvalue the other without an exchange of favors.Once you have made yourself valuable to someone, the personbecomes valuable to you. You value him or her because if you were everin trouble, they would have a stake—albeit a selfish stake—in gettingyou out. But now that you value the person, they should value you evenmore. Not only are you valuable because of your talents or habits, butyou are valuable because of your stake in rescuing him or her from hardtimes. The more you value the person, the more the person values you,